View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by IDS OpenDocs The Value of Grid-Scale Variable Renewable Energy Generation in Sub-Saharan Africa Assessing the Potential Contribution of Variable Renewable Energy to the Reliable Supply of Electricity in Kenya and Ghana Gruffudd Edwards and Chris J. Dent, University of Edinburgh Neal Wade, Newcastle University June 2017 Report for the Green Growth Diagnostics for Africa project Principal Investigator: Dr. Ana Pueyo, Institute of Development Studies 1 Contents 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................ 4 2. Generation Adequacy Assessment ............................................................................ 5 2.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 5 2.2 Reserve Margins ..................................................................................................... 6 2.3 Risk-Based Approaches ......................................................................................... 7 2.4 Modelling Requirements ......................................................................................... 9 3. Overview of Case Study Power Systems ................................................................. 10 3.1 Ghana ................................................................................................................... 10 3.2 Kenya ................................................................................................................... 13 4. Energy Resources in the Case-Study Countries ...................................................... 14 4.1. VG Resource Assessment .................................................................................... 14 4.1.1. Ghana ................................................................................................................ 14 4.1.2. Kenya ................................................................................................................ 15 4.2. The Hydrological Resource .................................................................................. 17 4.3. Thermal Generation .............................................................................................. 17 5. Demand and Energy Access .................................................................................... 18 5.1. Demand Trends and Forecasts ............................................................................ 18 5.2. Quantifying Energy Access ................................................................................... 19 5.3. Suppressed Demand and Alternative Adequacy Metrics ...................................... 21 5.4 International Power Transfers ............................................................................... 22 6. Specific Characteristics of the Case Study Systems Relevant to GAA .................... 23 7. Review of Previous Work Relating to GAA in SSA Power Systems ......................... 25 7.1 Previous Adequacy Assessments in Ghana and Kenya ....................................... 25 7.2 Adequacy Assessments for Other SSA Power Systems ...................................... 26 7.3 Miscellaneous Other Work Relevant to GAA in SSA Countries ............................ 29 8. Quantitative Example: The Wind Energy Resource in Kenya .................................. 30 8.1 The Kenyan Power System Scenario ................................................................... 30 8.2. Temporal Relationships between the Wind Resource and Demand ..................... 31 8.3. Temporal Relationships between the Wind and Hydrological Resources ............ 35 9. Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 38 Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ 40 References ..................................................................................................................... 41 2 Abbreviations and Acronyms Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic AICD East Africa Power Pool EAPP Electricity Company of Ghana ECG Energy Commission of Ghana EC Energy Regulatory Commission (of Kenya) ERC Expected Energy Not Served EENS First Order Reliability FOR Generation Adequacy Assessment GAA Ghana Grid Company GRIDCo Government of Kenya GoK Gross Domestic Product GDP Independent Power Producers IPPs Kenya Electricity Transmission Company KETRACO Kenya Power and Lighting Company Kenya Power Least Cost Power Development Plan LCPDP Liquefied Natural Gas LNG Loss of Load Expectation LOLE Loss of Load Probability LOLP Megawatt MW Ministry of Energy (of Kenya) MoE U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory NREL Northern Electricity Distribution Compnay NEDCO Nepalese Power System NPS Photovoltaic PV sequential Monte-Carlo simulation SMCS Solar and Wind Resources Assessment SWERA sub-Saharan Africa SSA Variable Renewable Generation VG Volta River Authority VRA Wien Automatic Simulation Planning Package WASP West Africa Power Pool WAPP 3 1. Introduction Securing a sufficient supply of reliable and affordable electricity is a huge challenge for countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Many countries in the region are experiencing rapid increases in the size of their populations, and even more rapid growth in their economies (World Bank 2017). As a result, the region experienced a 45 per cent increase in annual energy consumption between the years 2000-2014 (World Energy Outlook 2014), with the growth in some countries much higher. In 2009, the World Bank stated (Eberhard, Foster, Briceño-Garmendia, Ouedraogo, Camos and Shkaratan 2008) that SSA was amid a power crisis characterised by unreliable supplies, largely due to insufficient generating capacity and high prices. Indeed, in 2008, the World Bank’s Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD) project (AICD 2008) calculated that while there was a need for 7,000MW of additional power generation capacity to be installed in SSA countries each year, the total installed in prior years was only 1,000MW per year. This is a costly problem for SSA countries (Deloitte 2015), with the AICD project calculating in 2009 (Econ Poyry 2009) that the region would have to spend roughly four per cent of GDP annually on power sector investments to meet the demands of economic development, keep pace with population growth, and increase energy access. Despite major efforts toward increasing the reach of electricity networks in recent years, the SSA average rate of access in 2014 was only 35 per cent. Access rates are much lower in some countries – for example Chad has only four per cent, while Ethiopia has 73 million people without access. Thus, building very significant generation capacity is both essential and inevitable in the near future. For many reasons – including location, maturity of technology and speed of building, traditional fossil-fuel power plants are well-suited to fill the gap. However, many stakeholders in the SSA power sector are keen to see these power systems largely avoid such a highly polluting stage. Hydro power is already a major component of SSA’s generation fleet, and plentiful resource means that more reservoirs will likely be built. However, in some cases the potential for economically and politically viable development is insufficient to meet the growing demand alone. There is therefore a strong desire to see high penetrations of variable renewable generation (VG) within many systems (Africa Renewable Energy Initiative 2015). Indeed, the International Energy Agency’s ‘Energy Outlook’ summary for 2016 (World Energy Outlook 2016) states that the deployment of renewable generation already plays an important role in the mitigation of traditional energy security concerns, by moderating oil and 4 gas imports. However, they warn, rising shares of unpredictable and intermittent VG puts electricity security under the spotlight in a different way. Despite the hugely ambitious scale of current and near-future planned VG investments, there has been almost no system-level analysis of the reliability impacts of grid-scale VG in SSA countries. This is true for the academic community as well as governmental and industrial institutions. The ability of the generators within a power system to consistently meet the demands made of them by customers is known as the system's generation adequacy. Not only is it the case that there has been very little research on the potential contribution of VG to the generation adequacy of SSA power systems: detailed risk-based assessment of generation adequacy in developing countries in general has barely been addressed in the academic and industrial literature. As discussed later in this article, the demand for electricity in some developing countries is fully met only rarely, if ever, which makes the question of defining reliability inherently complicated and ambiguous. This article will survey the most relevant research, policies and sources of data relevant to generation adequacy assessment in two example SSA countries: Kenya and Ghana. It also includes an exploratory analysis of the temporal relationships between the hydro resource, wind resource and power demand in Kenya, with an emphasis on assessing the impact of limited data availability. 2. Generation Adequacy Assessment This section presents an overview of what generation adequacy is,